The Overweening Generalist is largely about people who like to read fat, weighty "difficult" books - or thin, profound ones - and how I/They/We stand in relation to the hyper-acceleration of digital social-media-tized culture. It is not a neo-Luddite attack on digital media; it is an attempt to negotiate with it, and to subtly make claims for the role of generalist intellectual types in the scheme of things.

Overweening Generalist

Friday, May 23, 2014

"An increasing number of logicians are coming to think that Aristotelian logic is inadequate." - Graham Priest, in a 2014 article I link to below.

Albert Einstein was asked to contribute an essay on Bertrand Russell for a compendium on Lord R, and it eventually appeared in Volume V of The Library of Living Philosophers, edited by P.A. Schilpp, 1944. In "Remarks On Bertrand Russell's Theory of Knowledge," Einstein said he immediately said yes when asked to write on Bertie, because, though he didn't enjoy a lot of contemporary scientific writers, he'd spent "innumerable happy hours" reading Russell, and the only writer he enjoyed more was Thorstein Veblen (who, incidentally, forecasted the obvious state of academia today, but in 1899!). Then Einstein realized he had a lot of cramming to do: he'd limited himself to physics, and had embarked on Russell's turf, which Einstein found "slippery." It seems clear from the outset that Einstein is dubious about Russell's field - logic - and how it undergirds mathematics and (maybe?) all knowledge.

The key questions for Einstein are: "What knowledge is pure thought able to supply independent of sense perception? Is there any such knowledge? If not, what precisely is the relation between our knowledge and the raw materials furnished by sense impressions?" Einstein's essay was published in 1944.

My experience with reading on various logics is sketchy. I'm not of a logical bent temperamentally - I tend to think Rhetoric has more dramatic and personal effects, socially - and yet I find any forays into Boolean thought, logic trees, Aristotle, informal fallacies, logical paradoxes, and how number theory fuses with logic? It's all delightful: I always cop an intellectual buzz if I get deep enough to "get lost"in it. Reading logic books feels a lot like reading linguistic books: I get to the point where all I can see in my mind's eye is absurdities, Cheshire Cats smiles floating before my eyes, the worm ouroburos eating its own tail, the seemingly surrealistic glint of reading a book about how words work, which uses words itself. A world filled with Dali-esque melting watches. For starters.

On a certain level, I think logic is bunk, or tends to the buncombe. And yet, it underpins all our advanced technology, including this thing I'm using right now to get my points across, so we must take It seriously. I think logic works fantastically well at very small levels, like logic gates in circuitry. I'm not sure it works all that well when describing society or as an approximation of the language of everyday living in the Cosmic Goof. Ahhh...but maybe I'm not reading the right type of logic? Or: how am I defining logic?

Every thought, even unconscious thought, can and has been modeled as the logic of neurons firing in a massive parallelism, involving ion channels, action potentials, axons and dendritic spines, all-or-nothing events, and, occurring in the synaptic clefts: the constant release and re-uptaking of neurotransmitting chemical messengers. I'm fascinated by the neuro-logic that does all this and creates circuits of perceptual frames commonly called metaphors, but I (logically) digress...

A pretty cool article in one of my favorite online magazines, Aeon, recently ran an essay by a philosopher named Graham Priest, and it's called "Beyond True and False,"and in it Priest argues that Western logicians, who have long dismissed Buddhist logic as mumbo-jumbo and "mysticism" have come around to an appreciation of it. The 2nd CE Mahayana Buddhist thinker Nagarjuna had insisted that "things derive their nature by mutual independence and are nothing in themselves." Any "thing" is empty, and yet it exists. We can only talk about a thing's "nature" when we include it in a field of other things. If you grok this immediately, you're the sort of person I love to party with.

Priest was one of the developers of something called plurivalent logic in the 1980s, and he asserts that neither he nor his colleagues knew anything about Mahayana Buddhist logic at the time...but their thinking had arrived at a very similar place. It's a breezy essay and delivered the reading-about-logic goods enough for me to get "high" off it. Try it, if you haven't already. It combines Buddhism and databases; what's not to like?

So, for Aristotle, there was only True or False, although I think Aristotle is more complicated than Priest lays him out here. The weird thing about Aristotle, as I continue to read him: his uber-famous book on Logic seems less nuanced about "reality" than his long, compendious and damned amazing book on Metaphysics. In his Logic, there is the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC) and the Principle of the Excluded Middle (PEM), which never made sense to me, irregardless the many modes I used to wrap my neurons around it. Methinks THC and CBD tend to dissolve PEM, PDQ.

Nagarjuna was working with the 600-plus year Buddhistic system of the catuskoti, or the logic of "four corners." Some statements are True, some False, just like Aristotle (it's highly unlikely Nagarjuna read Aristotle). But: Buddhistic logic had two more values: some statements are Both True and False; the fourth value was: some statements are Neither True nor False. Aristotle had actually briefly addressed the idea that a statement could be Both True and False, as if it were relatively trivial: these had to do with statements about future events. These statements violated his Principle of Non-Contradiction, so he seems to have wanted it to seem trivial.

Bertrand Russell, along with Alfred North Whitehead, had tried to use logical set theory to firmly put mathematics on a solid foundation. Indeed, the set of all sets is a member of itself; the set of all cats is not a cat, so it's not a member of the set of cats. (By the way: I find set theory a sure buzz, not unlike one small toke of very potent weed; your mileage may vary.) The problem of statements that were self-referential proved Russell's and Whitehead's undoing. Remember the Barber Paradox? Or simply the hilariously vexing problem of this sentence?:

This statement is false.
So yea: let's apply Aristotle's PNC to the set of all the sets that are not members of themselves.

Well, okay, after awhile my head explodes; my consciousness becomes pixillated and then spontaneously rearranges into a collage of shards of paisleys and encaustic purples and pinks. I like it.

Back to Priest's essay: I didn't know about Relevant Logic from the 1960s, which presaged Priest's and his colleagues' Plurivalent Logic. I hadn't known about the 1905 logical proof about ordinal numbers and the limit of noun phrases in a language with a finite vocabulary, from the Hungarian Julius Konig (worth a buzz all by itself). What a cool article.

When Priest tells us that Nagarjuna said that language frames our conventional "reality" but "beneath" this is ultimate reality that we can experience only in special states - such as meditation - but we can't say anything about this "ultimate reality" because it's ineffable and that saying anything about it puts us back into conventional "reality" (<-----I have made it a practice to put quotes around the word "reality" to draw attention to the fierce contentiousness of the term)...Dude! This guy was saying this in the 2nd century of the Common Era.

So the high point (and I do mean "high") of Priest's essay was the discussion about two different ineffable "realities": 1.) the "real" one
2.) the "nominal" one; the one where we use language to talk about how wild and transcendent our experience was of the ineffable.

Let us apply good ol' Aristotle's PNC to the above? If it's "ineffable" we can't say anything, period, right? It contradicts itself.

Or maybe: I say all we can say is what we can say, along with lots of hand waving and gestures and hopping up and down, dancing. Jumping outside these particular logic systems (or "Jootsing" as Douglas Hofstadter coined it: jumping outside of the system) into another logical system, let us say that, under the "game rules" of Nagarjuna and Aristotle, we can speak of anything, even the "ineffable." The problem is, we might find ourselves in a straightjacket on the way to the Funny Farm. Either that or find we've obtained disciples, so may as well go for the big bucks with a New Religion.

It turns out that when you convert a logical function (which only relates to ONE other thing, such as your biological father) to relational ones (which can derive any number of outputs), you can arrive at a Six-Value Relational Logic - Priest and Co's Plurivalent Logic. In this system, statements can be:

1. True
2. False
3. True and False (EX: "Both crows and horses can fly." Or better: "This is a sentence that has twenty-three words in it.")
4. Neither True nor False
5. Ineffable
6. Both True and Ineffable (Konig's thing, as shown in the article.)

Furthermore, with relations, these values become fuzzified. Indeed, my Generalist's approach to understandings of logical systems sees Plurivalent Logic as almost the same as Fuzzy Logic, developed by Lofti Zadeh around the same time Priest and Co were doing their thang.

By the way: has anyone found a value that is Both False and Ineffable? If so, I implore urgently: send it to me via Angels and/or quantum encryption, or a secret, coded message in tomorrow's crossword puzzle. Muchas gracias.

Western Counterculture Intellects Were Ahead of the Academics? Maybe?
Jeez! I like Priest for his wowee-gee presentation of developments in academic logic in the 20th century, but fer crissakes Priest!: read Gregory Bateson's work from the 1960s and 70s: he was pushing for a logic of relations then. And Robert Anton Wilson was telling his dope-smoking intellectual readers about multivalent logics in the 1960s: Von Neumann's quantum logic of "maybe" as a third value beyond Aristotle's True and False. RAW also turned the present writer (OG) onto Anatole Rapoport's four valued logic of True, False, Indeterminate, and Meaningless. RAW also showed how Korzybski, by 1933, had developed an Infinite-Valued Logic in which we must use our wits to assign probabilities to the veridicality of statements. RAW even promulgated the logic of "Sri Syadasti," in the serious-joke religion of Discordianism, which was developed in the 1960s. Note the many-valued stoner logic there! It seems to anticipate Priest and Co's 1980s Plurivalent Logic by at least a decade. (Could it have secretly influenced the academics?) Timothy Leary developed, in the early 1970s, a type of neuro-logic that was embedded in a system of phenomenological "circuits" in human minds that developed according to genes, accidents, habits, learning, the culture a person was born into, the language they used, their education, and their openness to novelty. These counterculture thinkers noted and cited a plethora of examples on non- and anti-Aristotelian thinking that had run through world cultures, running back to Taoism and the I Ching.

So: I've seen this many times before. The longtime academic seems to either not know, or knows but pretends to not know, that things are muddied once they survey the vast historical mindscape outside their Ivory Towers. I've seen it so often I expect it. Or hell: maybe Priest is at best oblivious. Or worse: dismissive. At least Priest admits Aristotle's bivalent logic has major problems and that 1800 years ago a non-Westerner was prefiguring the thought systems that he and his friends thought they were inventing. And also, Priest is right: seemingly "pure" thought-systems in logic and math later on prove to be surprisingly useful in the workaday world in the sensual, sensory, existential, phenomenological space-time continuum.

Sunday, May 11, 2014

He was reading about chromatography and with his wire-rimmed glasses and long hair, he looked like Benjamin Franklin with his balls hanging out.
-p. 60, Rhoney Gissen Stanley describing the legendary LSD alchemist "Bear" Owsley Stanley in Owsley and Me: My LSD Family.

Now here's a delightful little memoir that was up my counterculture alley. I try to read every book that comes out on cannabis, LSD, psilocybin, ecstasy and other psychedelics, but it's getting difficult to keep up. Arriving in 2012 and co-written with Al Franken's old and now-dead sidekick, Tom Davis, Stanley writes about the mid-late 1960s in Berkeley as if it were last year, with novelistic patches of remembered dialogue that we just have to take her words for as being...fairly...accurate? 50 years later? Anyway, it was a fun read.

Rhoney Gissen was an upper-class east coast jewish girl who wanted to get as far away from her repressed family as she could, and majoring in English at Berkeley in 1965 did the trick. Her LSD "family" is largely a threesome, with Augustus Owsley "Bear" Stanley III, and Melissa Cargill. The extended family turns out to be quite large: members of Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, members of the Hell's Angels, Richard Alpert (about to go to India and become Ram Dass), other luminaries that many of you could guess.

Gissen Stanley appended Owsley's last name, but they were never married; Gissen took the last name "Stanley" when she went back to school to become a dentist, many years after Owsley took the rap for his entire operation and went to prison; after all, she had had a child with him. The book has a sincere yet odd tone: most of the time the well-educated Gissen is obsessively in love with Owsley, and he loves here too, but it's complicated, and Gissen suffers through much of her memoir in a sort of heart-on-her-sleeve schoolgirl's crush on the charismatic Brilliant Man.

Owsley in hat and shades; Jerry Garcia in beard photo by Rosie McGee

And oh my: Owsley was brilliant. This was the main reason I picked up the book: here's a guy who's known for making the best LSD ever, for turning on almost an entire generation (mostly for idealistic reasons), and he was self-taught. And LSD is notoriously very, very difficult to make well. The ideas many of us got about how much technical know-how went into making the vastly superior or "purest" blue meth in "Breaking Bad"? LSD appears to be more difficult than that to produce at the most pure levels. (In one scene a batch of Owsley LSD is tested in a lab at UC Berkeley and is found to be 99% pure.)

But Owsley was a true modern alchemist, and Rhoney Gissen relates scenarios a-plenty that illustrate the wizard-like aspect of Owsley, who, while making LSD was often seen pouring over thick chemistry textbooks at a kitchen table, all night, in the nude. Here's a scene from early on:

At Bear's house one day, I opened the door to the tall and handsome Richard Alpert. He could have just stepped out of GQ in his polo shirt, tan pants, and boat shoes with tassels. I took him to the kitchen where Bear was naked and totally engrossed in two large books open before him on the table: Electromechanical Metallurgy and The Emerald Tablet of Hermes. Richard and I waited for him to look up and acknowledge us."Is he reading those two books at the same time?" he asked. "At least." I motioned for him to take a seat. Richard sat and began talking to Owsley, who just added the conversation as a third object of his attention. "LSD is not enough to bring me to liberation and bliss. I always come back down into my thinking mind, this body, these clothes." Owsley looked up and uncrossed his legs, moving his balls out of the way with his hands.
Gissen says Owsley saw himself as a psychedelic Prometheus, "enabling mankind to choose to take a sacrament for transformation of mind and soul. His LSD was the purest. Purity of LSD was his raison d'etre." A leitmotif in the book is Owsley, backstage at rock concerts or other gatherings of psychedelic intelligentsia, administering his 99% pure God-Juice sublingually from a Murine bottle he carried with him.

We get one of the most vivid pictures of Owsley yet in this book: his off-beat but erudite ideas about how important it was to eat meat - especially steak - rare; why he ended up living his last decades in extreme biodiversity, off the grid in Australia: because a huge storm was about to hit the Northern Hemisphere and bring on an ice age and Noah's flood-like conditions. (see p.253 for details) About Owsley's love of comic books, ballet, that astrology had actual merit, that the tips of his right hand pinky and ring finger had been lost since childhood (Why, again? It's sorta mysterious: Gissen, noticing hair was growing out of the finger-stumps: "What happened to your fingers?" Owsley, laughs dismissively: "I was a kid. But they grafted skin from my belly. That's why hairs grow.") Gissen paints an Owsley who usually thought if an idea wasn't his own, it was probably wrong. And a lot of the time he was right. He was a gifted lover of women, hated tobacco, and probably didn't let enough people know how much in debt he was to his main squeeze, the gorgeous and ultra-brilliant Melissa Cargill, who did major in Chemistry at Berkeley, and probably deserves much more credit for the purest LSD ever.

While we can understand why such chemists would rather remain mysterious, with hindsight it's perhaps time to reassess the technical and intellectual contribution Cargill made to late 1960s/early 1970s psychedelic culture.

At the same time, Owsley deserves far more notice for his stellar work in acoustics and sound engineering (again: mostly self-taught). His determination to aid and abet the Grateful Dead in bringing forth a new cosmic consciousness via not only LSD, but a synergy of psychedelics in human nervous systems, plus new ways to organize and record live rock music? He still seems relatively unheralded here, eh? He tinkered with speaker placement, condenser microphones, live rock sound controlled by a mixer who was stationed amidst the audience, allowing the band members to hear each other and themselves...prior to Owsley, loud rock bands were very noisy live; the sound was chaos. He played as big a part in engineering concert sound as anyone. How many people are aware of this? Even his home stereo was avant-garde:

If I could not be at a live show, next best was listening to music at Bear's. He modified his home audio system by exchanging the components of the amp and preamp with precision parts he ordered from an aircraft manufacturer. He changed the type of cables and the wiring of the connectors. He had the best speakers - JBLs with the cones exposed. He even altered these, adding a subwoofer to increase the amplitude of the bass. His placement of the two tall speakers was calculated to optimize the quality of the sound. I pulled out an LP of the Bulgarian Women's Choir. I placed the record into the turntable and dropped the needle. "Jerry Garcia loves this," I told Richard (Alpert).""Jerry Garcia is a bodhisattva," he said.
Later, Owsley is explaining to Gissen: "Nobody has figured out how to record live music. We can do it! We need time, and we have to get this acid tabbed, too. LSD is part of the alchemical equation and helps the music become transformative."
A word on Owsley's background: his great-great grandfather had come to Unistat on the Mayflower. His grandfather had been governor and US. Senator from Kentucky. His godfather was a Supreme Court Justice on the Earl Warren court, or so Rhoney Gissen says; I was unable to identify which Supreme was Owsley's godfather after at least fourteen minutes of Google searches. He grew up believing what his grandfather taught him: that Prohibition violated the Constitution: an adult person had the right to do with their own nervous system what they willed. This seems partly why, after his acid-team got busted in Orinda, just over the hills from Berkeley, Owsley eventually decided he could take the rap for everyone and, using a stack of law books, defend himself - with counsel - and not go to prison. But of course, that's not the way things shake out in this Epoch, as you well know, my friends. Owsley did a stretch in many prisons in the California Archipelago, much as Timothy Leary did. (Owsley learned metallurgy in prison, and his belt buckles sell like gold to this day...)
Speaking of Leary, there was a point where it was thought Owsley's "Hobbit" house in Berkeley (HERE, see about 50% of the way down the page) might be hot - the Feds may have been on to him - so someone in his circle pointed out there was a house available in the Berkeley hills near the one that Leary owned, but he balked because he perceived Leary as someone who sought media attention, and Owsley wanted nothing to do with that.

For denizens of Berkeley and surroundings, Grizzly Peak, Telegraph, Bancroft, and Sproul Plaza appear; Marin and the Oakland hills and the great rock auditoriums of San Francisco (Fillmore West/Winterland/Carousel Ballroom) are characterized. Bill Graham and Owsley didn't get along. Also: Boulder and Denver (and unnamed Tim Scully), and Woodstock, Monterey Pop, and Altamont appear. Owsley and Gissen visit Leary at Millbrook but Leary's only interested in drinking and the Owsley crew get busted by Liddy's pals as they leave. There's lots of driving while high on LSD. There are anecdotes about Hendrix being recorded privately at the Masonic Hall in San Francisco whilst everyone was very high (read to see what turned out with the tapes!), a quasi-hilarious bad trip with Buddy Miles, and a harrowing bad trip with Robert Hunter, who, it turns out, did an insane amount of strong LSD, by accident. They visit the Hollywood Hills and meet George Harrison, Joni Mitchell, and David Crosby.

I liked this book.

A couple of extra notes: I find it striking how acid cognoscenti were aided by the children of the wealthy elite in Unistat. Famously, the Mellon family's children helped Leary; Owsley was greatly aided by these types too. However, I fail to see any sort of the conspiracy that some have: the elites, in conjunction with CIA, sent their children to derail the counterculture. I think rich kids sometimes have different values than mumsy and pop. Also: this book is yet another that draws a distinction between the renegade flavor of the psychedelic counterculture on the West Coast of Unsitat, with the more Asiatic-religion-influenced trippers on the East Coast of Unistat. I wonder how "true" this distinction really was; I've seen it recur in book after book. I suspect much of this distinction has been born of a meme that propagated well, and even had "them dat wuz there" believing it, years later, as they recalled their lives in, say, 1969, at age 23.

Finally: the most striking element of the book was, to me, the passages in which Gissen is tripping marvelously through her 1960s, stoned, immaculate, listening to Ravi Shankar...and then the sudden juxtapositions of technical language in exposition of the making of LSD, which at times seem almost Joycean. (See, for example, pp. 48-52; 54-61; 71-74 (making DMT); and 101-104.) A taste, to ride out of the too-long review here:

Melissa took a washed beaker, squirted acetone on it, and held it up for inspection."See how clean! Look, the beaker is dry. Every piece of glassware must have a final rinse of acetone.""Oh, that acetone smells terrible. Anything that smells that bad can't be good for you.""Acetone smells bad but the flasks are glad," Melissa responded. She blasted the beaker with compressed air. "This hastens the drying process." She examined the glassware; if it were wet and there were any streaks or spots, it would come back for a do-over. We fell into a routine: eat, sleep, and work.We usually worked at night, and for this phase of the synthesis, columns clamped to rods were setup. Tim was in charge of packing them because he was tallest. The process is called column chromatography, or affinity chromatography, because the desired LSD - the iso-LSD - and the impurities have different affinities for the alumina adsorbent and separate out at different rates, or affinities, as they travel down the column. According to Bear, the trick was to get the mother liquor down the column without breaking off into crystals along the way.When Owsley first started making LSD, he did not use column chromatography to purify the acid. He used vacuum dessication...
Here's Owsley talking about psychedelic effects interacting with sound equipment:

About Me

I have furore scribendi which veers into verborrhea. My favorite media (anything that mediates between our sensoria and what is outside our skin) are, in order: books, Internet, CDs (!), DVDs, TV, clothes. I like hoppy beer and New World zins, Indian and Thai food, John Coltrane, JS Bach and heavy metal, the Lakers and Angels, redwood trees, hiking and yoga, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens, heretical ideas and pornography. If you want me to write for you, for money, contact rmjon23[at]aol[dot] com. You can also drop a line and say hi, but please be nice 'cuz I'm a delicate creature of Nature.

Sir Isaiah Berlin

"An intellectual is a person who wants ideas to be as interesting as possible. Unless you think the ideas you are discussing are interesting to you, whatever you may believe yourself, the history of ideas will remain a catalogue of unexamined doctrines, terribly boring and unreal."

-Isaiah Berlin, in conversation with Ramin Jahanbegloo

Leonardo da Vinci

Epitome of Renaissance Man

Athanasius Kircher (c.1600-1680)

The last universal polymath? The last man to know everything? Egyptologist, archaeologist, mathematician, vulcanologist, physicist, biologist.